Medication non-adherence has become one of the nation's biggest public health burdens, costing over $170 billion annually. 50-75% of patients are estimated to be non-adherent, particularly in common chronic diseases such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes. Non-adherence leads to poor management of chronic disease, significantly higher death rates, and weakening of the physician-patient relationship. Causes of non-adherence include complicated treatment regimens, inconvenience, cognitive ability, manual dexterity, and forgetfulness, problems exacerbated by age. The average number of prescriptions per capita is 12.6, not including supplements. Patients have increasingly more difficulty with adherence to a medication regimen as the number of prescribed medications increases and as the dosing frequency varies.
Presently available solutions to non-adherence address some patient frictions but prove either ineffective or impractical at scale. Simple, singular interventions such as alarms, monitoring, and follow-up calls are marginally effective. The simple pillbox allows patients to pre-organize medications into time slots; however, it requires high motivation, cognitive function, and manual dexterity to preload the pillbox reliably without error. Furthermore, most models do not alert the patient to take the medication at the necessary time. The demand for a device that automatically dispenses pills at a designated time is evidenced by the prior art literature, which include U.S. Pat. No. 4,572,403 to Benaroya, U.S. Pat. No. 4,573,606 to Lewis, U.S. Pat. No. 4,674,651 to Scidmore, U.S. Pat. No. 4,838,453 to Luckstead, U.S. Pat. No. 5,044,516 to Hoar, U.S. Pat. No. 5,176,285 to Shaw, U.S. Pat. No. 5,392,952 to Bowden, U.S. Pat. No. 5,472,113 to Shaw, U.S. Pat. No. 5,564,593 to East, U.S. Pat. No. 5,609,268 to Shaw, U.S. Pat. No. 6,068,158 to Chabout, U.S. Pat. No. 6,510,962 to Lim, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,702,146 to Varis. However, while prior art pill dispensing machines and systems illustrate the capacity to automatically dispense pills, these machines and systems rely on manual loading of pill storage compartments to include the precise set of pills to be dispensed at each dispersal time point. The process of manually loading pill storage compartments is challenging for users with limited manual dexterity. In the case that pills in loaded pill storage compartments need to be exchanged, each pill storage compartment needs to be manually reloaded and the contents of each pill storage compartment manually resorted. Such limitations of prior art pill dispensing machines and systems create behavioral disincentives to user adoption.
Abdulhay in U.S. Pat. No. 7,048,141, U.S. Pat. No. 7,213,721, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,711,449 attempts to overcome these deficiencies by dispensing pills in a combinatorial manner from separate silos; however, Abdulhay's means of dispersal requires separate built-in funnels to accommodate different pill sizes. Given the ever-growing variety of pill sizes and shapes, such a finite, limited approach to combinatorial pill dispersal is still yet inadequate.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a pill dispersal system that overcomes the disadvantages of prior art medication organizing and dispensing devices. A specific object is to provide a pill dispensing that offers a centralized system of pill organization and dispersal; a capacity for dynamic, modular alteration of pills; a user-friendly interface; an alert system; and a system for behavioral feedback.